Latest / Becker’s Healthcare -- Pediatric Leadership Podcast / Christine Young, Chief Nursing Officer at Akron Children’s

Transcript

Christine Young, Chief Nursing Officer at Akron Children’s · Becker’s Healthcare -- Pediatric Leadership Podcast

• 0:00
  Welcome everyone to another Becker's Healthcare podcast.
• 0:03
  I'm Ryan Muhammad with Becker's Healthcare.
• 0:05
  I'm thrilled to have you have with me today. Christine Young,
• 0:08
  chief nursing Officer at Akron Children's. It's so nice to meet you.
• 0:13
  How are you today?
• 0:15
  I'm doing well, thank you. Thank you for having me.
• 0:17
  Of course. Well I am so excited to be speaking with you today. Um,
• 0:21
  and to begin,
• 0:22
  would you mind please introducing yourself and telling us a bit about your
• 0:26
  background?
• 0:27
  Sure. Um, I'm Christine Young.
• 0:29
  I'm the Chief Nursing Officer at Akron Children's Hospital.
• 0:32
  I've been in the role since 2017. Um,
• 0:35
  I've been a nurse for almost 30 years.
• 0:37
  I started my career as a clinical nurse in a high risk obstetrics unit
• 0:42
  and I've been in nursing leadership for over 20 years.
• 0:45
  So I came to Akron Children's about 10 years ago. I was, um,
• 0:50
  overseeing the neonatal services in the organization and then in
• 0:54
  2017, um, was promoted to the chief nursing officer role.
• 1:00
  Wonderful. Well, with all that experience,
• 1:02
  I know you're gonna have some great answers for us, Jay. Um, so Christine,
• 1:06
  would you mind, uh,
• 1:07
  jumping us off with a great answer to my first real question? Um,
• 1:11
  it's what issues are you spending most of your time on today in your field?
• 1:16
  So today is so different than how the rest of my career has gone.
• 1:21
  Never have we seen more changes in leadership and especially nursing
• 1:25
  leadership than we have during and,
• 1:28
  and during this time of the pandemic and kind of emerging from the pandemic.
• 1:32
  Um, the two issues that I'm dealing with most of the time, I think,
• 1:36
  go hand in hand. One is workforce.
• 1:39
  And I don't think that's an unusual thing that for anyone to hear that we're all
• 1:42
  dealing with workforce and in healthcare that's especially pertinent.
• 1:46
  And then how it impacts the ability, um,
• 1:49
  for our patients and family to access services that they need.
• 1:53
  So those two really go hand in hand and by me focusing
• 1:57
  energy on making sure that we have the workforce that we need to make sure care
• 2:01
  is seamless and uninterrupted for our patients and families.
• 2:06
  So thinking about recruitment, um, retention,
• 2:10
  optimization of throughput for patients,
• 2:13
  really focusing on how do we maximize our workforce and keeping them
• 2:18
  healthy in order to provide that access for our patients,
• 2:21
  which is so very important today. Um,
• 2:24
  one of the other things I'm spending a lot of time on,
• 2:27
  and I alluded to it a little bit, is workforce health.
• 2:30
  It's been a difficult time over the past three years for workers in the
• 2:34
  healthcare field and I think paying attention to their, i'll,
• 2:38
  I'll say wellbeing and mental health, cuz those are a little bit nuanced to me,
• 2:42
  but thinking about how we keep them well and then how we provide the services
• 2:46
  they need, should they need them to optimize their mental health as well,
• 2:50
  given the difficulties that they're dealing with on a day-to-day basis in their,
• 2:54
  in their everyday work.
• 2:56
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 2:58
  You brought up some great points and kind of thinking about the future,
• 3:02
  how are you thinking about investments and growth, um,
• 3:06
  in the next two to three years or so?
• 3:09
  So I think investing in our people is critical.
• 3:13
  So looking at their development and then looking at um,
• 3:17
  how do we create pipelines for those with interest in
• 3:22
  going to the healthcare care field and how do we make that attractive?
• 3:25
  So thinking about how to reach down into the high school students and the
• 3:30
  college students earlier and engaging them in conversation about what it is
• 3:35
  to be in healthcare and why it's such a wonderful profession and, uh,
• 3:39
  how mission driven it is to work in healthcare. So I think investing in people,
• 3:44
  um, from a pipeline recruitment perspective and then as well from a retention
• 3:49
  perspective, um, thinking about what do healthcare workers nurses need,
• 3:54
  how do we achieve that work-life balance and healthy work environment for them?
• 3:59
  And then their development, their professional development programs as well.
• 4:03
  One that we've I've recently started is a rising nurse leader
• 4:08
  program to grow the healthcare leaders of the future. Um,
• 4:12
  healthcare leadership has also been difficult over the past three years.
• 4:16
  It's always been difficult,
• 4:17
  but it really brought to surface a lot of issues over the,
• 4:19
  over the past three years with the pandemic.
• 4:22
  And I think investing in growing our leaders is incredibly
• 4:26
  important. So looking for those high potential, um,
• 4:30
  people in the workforce and offering them opportunities to start to develop
• 4:34
  those skills before they're in a formal role so that they're ready to go when
• 4:39
  those roles do prevent present themselves in um, a way to,
• 4:43
  to support succession planning as well. Um,
• 4:47
  one of the other things that I always think about when thinking about
• 4:51
  investments in the future is digital health.
• 4:54
  How do we use technology to leverage that work environment?
• 4:58
  How do we really help the healthcare workers
• 5:04
  decrease the burden by automation? Um,
• 5:06
  we're looking at a virtual nurse program and I know some other organizations
• 5:10
  have started testing those,
• 5:12
  so we're thinking about how does that work in the pediatric environment.
• 5:16
  So really wanting to pilot a virtual nurse program to help support the
• 5:21
  caregivers who are at the bedside and giving um,
• 5:24
  an opportunity for nurses to work virtually as well. I think that's a big, um,
• 5:29
  issue today is a lot of people wanna work remotely. There's some, um,
• 5:34
  benefits to that from a work-life balance and how can we find that right
• 5:37
  balance, especially in the nursing profession, which is so hands-on,
• 5:41
  but there may be able,
• 5:42
  we may be able to find some opportunities to be innovative and creative around
• 5:46
  that.
• 5:47
  And those are the things that we need to look at as when we think about how we
• 5:51
  optimize the workforce, um, in the future.
• 5:56
  Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. And before I let you go Christine,
• 6:00
  the last thing I wanted to ask you is what are you most excited about right now?
• 6:04
  Whether that's something you're doing personally or something that's happening
• 6:08
  in your field, anything like that?
• 6:11
  Yeah, I think, um, we're really on the,
• 6:13
  the starting block of how we transform care delivery.
• 6:18
  So when we think about healthcare, we all have our roles. So nurses have roles,
• 6:22
  physicians have roles, advanced practice providers, therapists,
• 6:26
  every single member of the healthcare team.
• 6:28
  And I'm really excited about transforming those roles into delivery of
• 6:33
  care by a team,
• 6:34
  with everyone working to the top of their scope and really that will improve
• 6:39
  access for patients as well.
• 6:41
  And everyone working together is that healthcare team and I think we are really
• 6:45
  on the cusp of transformation around that. Um,
• 6:48
  I think it accelerated with the pandemic that we had a note,
• 6:51
  we had to do things differently because doing things the way we've always done
• 6:55
  them is likely not sustainable into the future.
• 6:59
  So that's really exciting cuz there's endless possibilities about what those
• 7:02
  models of care could look like and ultimately bene benefiting the patients and
• 7:07
  families and supporting those high quality outcomes that we're committed to.
• 7:13
  Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing those final thoughts with me,
• 7:16
  Christine. Uh, that is all I have time for you today.
• 7:20
  So I wanna thank you again for joining me and this has been a great discussion.
• 7:24
  I look forward to connecting with you again soon.
• 7:26
  Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.